On December 5, 1992, the first text message was sent by Neil Papworth:  “Merry Christmas.”  We’ve certainly come a long way, and I am way behind.
 
           I especially have a difficult time with the new language of texting.  HHAYT?  F-TY?  ROFL?  FWIW?  BFF?  I wonder if some day we will all forget how to actually spell out words and future generations will need some sort of Rosetta Stone to figure out what we were saying to each other.

            From the context of several blogs I read, I finally understood that BFF must somehow refer to “best friend,” but the second “F” had me stumped.  Best Female Friend was the best I could come up with until the day I saw it appended to a man’s name.  So I swallowed my pride—yet again—and asked.  “Best Friend Forever,” I was told.  Mystery solved.

            Yes, you know me by now; I started thinking about Bible things.  This one is really so obvious, isn’t it?  Yet it seems somehow inappropriate to us to refer to a Divine Being as our “Best Friend.”  In fact, Jesus was called “a friend of sinners” as an insult wasn’t He?  The Son of man came eating and drinking, and they say, Behold, a gluttonous man and a winebibber, a friend of publicans and sinners! Matt 11:19.  Aren’t we so glad He was? 

            James had no qualms about calling Abraham “the friend of God,” 2:23, because of the life of faith he lived.  It is possible, in fact, it is something we should all strive for.  What better friend could we have? 

            Do you think you cannot possibly achieve that goal?  Abraham was not a perfect man; he failed more than once.  Remember his lie about Sarah being his sister, something they tried everywhere they went, not just the two places they were caught at it, Gen 20:12,13?  How can we see that as anything but a lack of faith in God to keep them safe?  Yet all through his life, not just in this but also in the decision to use Hagar as a surrogate, Abraham probably did not envision his failures as faithless, but as a man who truly believed God’s promises and showed that belief by trying to help God when it seemed that circumstances might interfere. 

            Abraham learned over the years through the many misfortunes his “helping” brought him, that God could take care of Himself, that He did not need Abraham’s assistance.  The Lord waited until Sarah was physically unable to bear children.  He had Abraham send away Ishmael, the “just in case” baby.  Finally, on that lonely mountain when God asked the unthinkable, Abraham “got it.”  “God can raise him from the dead,” the Hebrew writer tells us Abraham thought, 11:19.  So he did as God asked and offered his son, just as his Friend would one day offer His.

            You don’t have to be perfect to be a friend of God.  You just have to believe and grow in that belief, learning to trust no matter how senseless it seems, to obey no matter the cost.  Do you want a real BFF?  So does God.  So does His Son.  And you can be it.
 
Greater love has no man than this that a man lay down his life for his friends. You are my friends, if you do the things which I command you, John 15:13,14.
 
Dene Ward

I was a teenager and remember the drama well.  On Dec 3, 1967, Dr Christiaan Barnard performed the first human heart transplant.  Louis Washkansky, a grocer from South Africa, received the heart of Denise Darvall, an automobile accident victim who had been declared brain dead.  The transplant was a success.  Mr. Washkansky’s body did not reject the organ and it functioned well.  However, 18 days later he died of complications, in this case double pneumonia.  Still, it was a medical milestone and that operation has gone on to become a viable treatment for many heart patients.
 
           Heart transplants, though, have been going on for thousands of years.  God has always required them.  What is repentance but the removal of an old sinful heart and the replacement of a completely new one?  . And I will give them one heart, and a new spirit I will put within them.  I will remove the heart of stone from their flesh and give them a heart of flesh, that they may walk in my statutes and keep my rules and obey them.  And they shall be my people, and I will be their God, Ezek 11:19,20.

            Too many times repentance is only skin deep.  We force ourselves to stop the old life and struggle every day to live the new one.  God wants us to rip out that old, stony heart and replace it with one that not only performs righteous deeds, but wants to perform them, wants to please Him, and wants to live as a follower of His Son.  It is so much easier to do right when the motivation is righteousness itself.

            But let’s be practical.  Sometimes the zeal wanes.  Sometimes we hit rough spots in the road and our desire to do right falters.  Temptation can overtake even the strongest.  Does that mean I have not made a new heart within me?  Not really.  How does that heart feel when it realizes it has fallen?  Maybe that is the telling point.  In his psalm of repentance after his atrocious sins David says, “The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: A broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise,” not long after he begs God to, “Create in me a clean heart,” (Psalm 51:17 and 10).  It seems even a completely new heart can gather a little grime once in awhile, so do not be conquered by depression when you fail.

            If, however, you have not replaced that old heart with a new one, if you find yourself not only giving into temptation often but looking for the chance to and caring only whether or not you get caught, maybe you still have an old heart.  Maybe your soul rejected the new one. 

            God knows whether you had a heart transplant or not, and whether that surgery achieved its goal.  It may often be a painful operation, but it has a great record of success.  Lots of folks live forever.
 
Cast away from you all your transgressions, wherein you have transgressed; and make you a new heart and a new spirit: for why will you die, O house of Israel?  For I have no pleasure in the death of him who dies, says the Lord Jehovah: wherefore turn yourselves, and live, Ezek 18:31,32..
 
Dene Ward

For he is not a man, as I am, that I should answer him, that we should come together in judgment.  There is no umpire between us, that he might lay his hand upon us both, Job 9:32,33.
           
            On October 6, 1845, attorney William R. Wheaton umpired the first recorded “modern” game of base ball (two separate words in those days).  The teams were amateur clubs, and the Knickerbockers Club of New York set forth the rule that there should be three umpires, one chosen by each team, and a neutral referee to decide split decisions.  In 1858, the National Association of Base Ball Players sanctioned a single umpire chosen by the home team with the consent of the rival captain.  And so umpires have been ruling the diamond ever since.

            In those very early days, the umpire was usually a spectator or a player; someone, in other words, who knew the game well, and, even in the case of a spectator, probably had experience playing it.  Who better to understand what was happening?  Would you choose someone off the street who had never even seen a game?  Would you choose someone from another country who could hardly even speak English to make important decisions in a distinctly American pastime?

            And so Job says that we had the same problem under the Old Law—there was no one who understood both sides of the equation.  There was no one who could “lay his hands on both” God and man.

            Then God emptied Himself, taking “the form of a servant,” becoming man, being “tempted in all points like us.”  Finally there was someone who understood both what it was like to be man and what is was like to be God.  He could identify with either and sympathize with both.  Is there anyone any better qualified to be “the one mediator between God and man, himself man, Christ Jesus?”

            We have talked about that often, and read those passages often, but they reminded me of something I need to be careful about.  When I was much younger, I had all the answers.  When someone came to me with a problem, the solution was simple.  “This is what the Bible says to do.  If you don’t, you don’t have enough faith.  Shame on you!”  In every case, I had no experience with the problem they were asking about, and so while I may have had a “right” answer, what I was seriously lacking in was compassion.  I really did not understand the problem because I had never experienced it.  But I am not the only one.  Many of my brethren are notorious for a lack of compassion, for stern reprimands and little understanding.

            Let me say this quickly—having compassion does not mean the right answer changes.  What it does mean is I am less judgmental, more willing to forgive, and far more willing to see a problem through with a brother or sister, no matter how long it takes.  I am far less likely to become exasperated when they need encouragement yet again.  I understand that one long afternoon of counseling doesn’t necessarily make all the ramifications of sin disappear.  I MUST understand that I DON’T really understand and never will, and therefore must be patient.  If God had to become man to understand what it was like to be a man, why do I think I can come running in with my rigid rules and expect a person to suddenly become my idea of the perfect Christian when I have never been in their shoes?  I am one lousy advisor (umpire) if I do.

            Which then, of course, makes me realize how blessed we are to be standing in these “last days,” where we do have that Umpire, who can lay His hands upon us both, and with amazing compassion, understand every problem, every trial, and every failure.  And this Umpire, who is far more merciful than we are, never makes a bad call.
 
Since the children are sharers in flesh and blood, he also himself in like manner partook of the same, that through death he might bring to nought him that had the power of death, that is, the devil; and might deliver all them who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage. For verily not to angels does he give help, but he gives help to the seed of Abraham.  Wherefore it behooved him in all things to be made like unto his brethren, that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in things pertaining to God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people.  For in that he himself has suffered being tempted, he is able to succor them that are tempted, Heb 2:14-18.
 
Dene Ward

On September 16, 1940, as a result of the Burke-Wadsworth Act , the United States imposed the first peacetime draft in its history.  Men aged 21 to 36 were required to register and it was estimated that 20 million were eligible.  50% were rejected for health reasons or illiteracy.  By the end of World War II, the age requirement had stretched to 37.  34 million had registered and 10 million had served.  Although a Conscientious Objector status was created, 5000-6000 were imprisoned for failing to register or serve.

            God’s kingdom has no need of a Selective Service System because everyone is “drafted” at their new birth.  You cannot be a citizen in His kingdom without being a soldier as well.  We are required to fight every day of our lives, in every arena imaginable.  In the home, at the office, at school, in traffic or crowded malls, even in the solitude of our own rooms Satan can find a way to pick a fight.  Sometimes it’s an open battle against a false doctrine.  Other times it’s a quiet struggle against temptation.  No matter what kind of battle he wages, God expects us to equip ourselves for it and to fight with all our strength.

            We cannot beg off duty because of spiritual flat feet.  We won’t be rejected due to spiritual illiteracy.  If we have not worked to make ourselves strong and studied to gain the knowledge and encouragement we need to win, we will become an easy mark in the war, and we will have only ourselves to blame.

            And if we refuse to register and serve?  The enemy is out there whether we choose to fight or not.  We will simply become the first of many casualties.

            Yet for the Christian who serves willingly, who arms himself with the invincible armor of God, the war has already been won.  We are simply fighting the last skirmishes, the clean-up operations, which will finally, and utterly, destroy the enemy and grant us eternal peace.

Suffer hardship with me as a good soldier of Christ.  No soldier on service entangles himself in the affairs of this life, that he may please him who enrolled him as a soldier, 2 Tim 2:3,4.

Dene Ward

We are so far out in the country that we only receive two TV channels, and those are snowy on good days.  Many years ago we all agreed that we would give up other gifts to have a 75 foot TV antenna with a booster erected outside the house as our family Christmas gift.  The Gators were playing so in order to have it working as soon as it was up Keith did not wait to drill a hole through the floor and run the wire up that way.  He simply pulled out a corner of the window screen closest to the television, and opened the window a crack.  He would get to it later.  As is the case with most of us, “later” was put off longer and longer.

            Then one morning the inevitable happened.  I looked over and thought, “That wire certainly looks thicker than usual.”  When I got closer I discovered the reason—a black racer had wound itself around it, and was already halfway through the window. 

            I grabbed a broom and smacked at the window, hoping that would scare the snake back outside.  It worked the opposite way.  The snake’s slow slither through the opening turned into a swift swish all the way inside, dropping with a thud on the floor.  Yikes!  Now I had a snake in my house.  I was not going to leave it.  If I lost track of it, I knew I would never sleep again with a snake somewhere inside, especially one that had shown a proclivity for climbing.  I could just imagine it wound around the posts at the head of my iron bed while I slept.

            Luckily the boys were home that day. They ran to get the things I called for while I kept an eye on the unwelcome visitor. Together we did our best to scare that snake out the door with brooms and mops and anything else we could find.  It kept curling into a ball or hiding under a chair.  At one point, the thought crossed my mind to try sucking it up in the vacuum—at least the hose would be a perfect fit! 

            I came to my senses before that thought became a spoken idea, and told them to bring a box.  Lucas found one and put the box on the floor, open side toward the snake, while I swept it with the broom.  Every time it neared the box, it flattened itself and slid underneath it instead of going inside.  We tried several times, but finally my nerves were shot. I was through trying to be nice to this one of God’s creatures. 

            Once more I sent the boys on an errand.  When they returned, I stood on a chair, loaded the proffered .22 pistol with rat shot so I wouldn’t blow a hole in either the floor or the wall (normally I use a shotgun with a much heavier load) and shot that snake where he lay.  I gave him his chance and he blew it.  He was not going to use my house as his own private playground.

            All that for a literal snake, while we had voluntarily let loose an electronic snake in our home.  When we chose to go to the expense of installing that other kind of snake, it was with a purpose—we were seldom able to watch our teams play; this was the only way and the cheapest in the long run.  But our boys knew that it was not there for indiscriminate watching.  More than once we uttered that mean word, “No.”  More than once we turned it off and said, “Never again,” for a particular show.  We even limited their hours of “good” show time.  We did not want to be responsible for creating illiterate, overweight, glassy-eyed couch potatoes.

            The first professional television drama began on September 11, 1928, “The Queen’s Messenger,” and broadcast television has come a long way from those innocent days.  Calling it a snake is an apt metaphor, especially when you remember the first appearance of a snake in the Bible. 

            Not everyone is careful with that snake in their homes.  Not only do they let it sit in the corner unmonitored, but many even let it baby-sit their children.  It feeds their minds and their hearts for hours every day.  It teaches them that sin is acceptable, and that anyone who thinks otherwise is either hateful or crazy.  It inures them to foul language and crude comments.  It teaches children—and adults--to take pleasure watching the sins of others, to admire those sinners and want to emulate them, right down to the clothes they wear.  It tells them that nothing is sacred, except the right to do anything they please without censure.

            Some people do keep snakes as pets, but they learn how to handle them, and know better than to let them loose unattended.  If you are going to keep an electronic snake in your home, remember to keep a close eye on it, and never let it teach your children.  Abdicating your responsibility as parents is aiding and abetting the enemy.

For I have told [Eli] that I will judge his house forever, for the iniquity which he knew, because his sons did bring a curse upon themselves, and he restrained them not, 1 Sam 3:13.

Dene Ward

Hurricane season is now at its peak.  As a child I remember one hurricane—Donna, who arrived on Sept 10, 1960.  She struck south Florida as a category 4 storm, turned and came back east across the middle of the state, then veered north, becoming the only hurricane of record to produce hurricane force winds in every state on the US Atlantic coast from Florida to New England.

            She blew through Orlando on a Saturday night.  Our parents woke my sister and me and moved us to the center of the house because the wind was blowing rain up under the eaves and it was running down through the walls and seeping in at the baseboards next to our beds.  While they packed towels around those baseboards, I slept through what were probably the scariest moments of my childhood—I was 6 at the time.  The next morning church services were cancelled, a first in my life, and I was a little afraid we would all wind up in Hell, especially when the sun began to shine mid-morning. 

            After that it seemed that we always managed to live in the right place.  For forty-four years the storms always went another way.  Then 2004 happened.  Charlie, Frances, Jeanne, and Ivan all hit Florida within a few weeks of each other.  Frances and Jeanne descended upon our area of North Central Florida.  Seventeen inches of rain were followed by twelve more only two weeks later.  By then, the pine trees were like spoons standing in thick soup, and many fell.  We were in constant prayer that they would not fall on us.  We went a day and a half without power or telephone, which could have been much worse.  People just a mile east of us were without power for ten days.  A neighbor loaned us his generator for a few hours, and we saved the produce and meat in the freezer.  Others had to list their losses on insurance reports.

            This time, though, was much different than my childhood experience.  As a child you really have no idea of the possibilities.  As an adult you understand that a direct hit could completely destroy everything you have, and, though we all joked about getting together to blow in the same direction at the same time, huffing and puffing like the Big Bad Wolf to push the storm the other way, there is nothing at all you can do about it.

            Far from sleeping through it, I remember lying in the dark in the wee hours of the morning, listening.  When the rain let up for awhile, I could hear a gust of wind coming from a long way off.  “It sounds like a train,” people always say about tornadoes, and the same was true of that wind.  It came closer and closer, louder and louder, finally slamming against the house, followed by complete silence, except for the sloshing of water in the water heater. 

            A minute later it started again.  And again.  And again.  I lay there for an hour listening to the gusts come over and over, praying fervently every time that I would not hear a tree cracking just before it fell on us, or the screaming of the roof as it tore off the rafters, but only the water heater sloshing its load back and forth as the house was once again nudged just a bit on its pillars.

            Helplessness can be paralyzing, but to a child of God, it should be empowering.  For He has said to me, My grace is sufficient for my power is made perfect in weakness.  Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses so that the power of Christ may rest upon me, 2 Cor 12:9.  When you finally realize that you are not in control, you can stop worrying about it.  What will happen, will happen.  Things may turn out all right in this life, and they may not, but whatever happens, you can deal with it.  Christ has promised that His grace is sufficient to bear any burden.

            In our society with all its various insurances, retirement accounts, and pension plans, we may never truly grasp our dependence upon God.  We may give lip service to the notion that we depend on Him for everything, but the comprehension just isn’t there, and it shows when our “things” and our “plans” are more important than our service and our trust, when the loss of those things sends us into a tailspin we cannot pull out of.  I cannot save myself; neither can you.  I do not deserve to be saved; neither do you.  If I really understand that—if you really understand that—it will make all the difference.

            So if you have ever experienced helplessness in life, a moment when you finally realize that you cannot fix things yourself, it is both a devastating and a glorious moment.  Thank God that it finally happened.  It cannot help but spill over into your spiritual awareness as well—you will finally begin to understand and appreciate grace.

I will give you thanks with my whole heart…I will worship toward your holy temple, and give thanks to your name for your lovingkindness and for your truth…In the day that I called, you answered.  You encouraged me with strength in my soul…Though I walk in the midst of trouble you will revive me...The Lord will fulfill His purpose in me. Your lovingkindness, O Jehovah, endures forever, selected from Psalm 138.

Dene Ward

From my journal:  Monday, June 13, 2005.
This is the big day.  “Terrified” pretty well says it all.  We began it with a prayer and that prayer continued on silently through the day for both of us.  
    Today I will undergo a surgery that has never been done successfully before, using a newly invented device that has never been used before.  If it works, my vision will be saved for awhile longer.  If it doesn’t, I will be blind in that eye.  If we don’t try it, I will be blind in both eyes, probably before the year is out.
  
 We arrived early, expecting a wait, but they took me straight in, after I signed some special consent forms upstairs.  Since the FDA had not approved this, “you will have to sign your life away,” the doctor told me, but what choice did I have?  I signed page after page, and then initialed some handwritten lines added along the side of the form.  One of them said, “I understand that no one knows how this material will interact with human tissue.”  Finally they sent me back downstairs to the surgical floor.  

    When the nurse called me in, Keith and I shared a long hug.  I am sure that no one else there understood why we made such a big deal out of this, but it was possible that I would never see him out of that eye again, and maybe not the other before much longer.

    That was quite a day and quite an experience.  I was, as noted above, terrified.  You don’t sign your life away like that unless you are desperate, unless the only other choice is a bad one.  I did it, and it gave my left eye another year and a half of vision before we had more difficult and painful surgeries to go through, which have spared me yet again.  The right eye, the one that took the plunge first on this day ten years ago, is still hanging in there.  Signing my life away has given me ten more years of vision so far, years no one expected even if the surgery worked, and who knows how much more to come before the medications stop working and the shunt is compromised.

    That level of desperation is the level you must feel in your spiritual life before you will “sign your life away” to God.  

    And suddenly there was a great earthquake, so that the foundations of the prison-house were shaken: and immediately all the doors were opened: and every one's bands were loosed. And the jailor, being roused out of sleep and seeing the prison doors open, drew his sword and was about to kill himself, supposing that the prisoners had escaped. But Paul cried with a loud voice, saying, Do yourself no harm: for we are all here. And he called for lights and sprang in, and, trembling for fear, fell down before Paul and Silas, and brought them out and said, Sirs, what must I do to be saved?  Acts 16:26-31.

    Do you think that jailor wasn’t terrified?  Do you think he wasn’t desperate?  Imagine how that plea sounded coming from this trembling man who thought his life was over.  “What must I do to be saved?”

    Desperate people do desperate things—like commit their lives to God.  If you never felt that desperation, chances are your commitment was not real.  Chances are you will fall when times get tough, when sacrifices are demanded, when you lose more than you bargained for.  Desperate people do not bargain.  They take the first offer and take it immediately.

    How desperate were you when you were offered salvation?  If you “grew up in the church,” you may never have felt it.  Doing what everyone expects of you is not desperation.  Wanting the approval of others, especially one particular “other” is not desperation.  “Just in case” is not desperation.  You have to recognize a need and know there is no other way of taking care of that need.  You have to know what it means to stand a sinner before a holy God—and it doesn’t mean you feel guilty because you stole a cookie from the cookie jar.  But Simon Peter, when he saw it, fell down at Jesus' knees, saying, Depart from me; for I am a sinful man, O Lord, Luke 5:8.  That, standing a sinner before a holy God, is the recognition you must come to.

    Signing your entire life away to God is exactly what He expects of you.  So therefore, any one of you who does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple, Luke 14:33. Nothing and no one can be more important to you than Him.   I have been crucified with Christ, and it is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me, Gal 2:20.  Your entire life is no longer yours to do with as you please, but since you know that is your only hope, you do it gladly.
    
    How desperate were you?  How desperate are you now?

If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth. For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory, Col 3:1-3.

Dene Ward